In 1979, 22-year-old John Cannon collected his diploma from Michigan State, got into a beat-up car (purchase price: $100) and headed to Florida, just in time for the beginning of the state's luxury building boom. Today, he's one of the region's leading custom home builders, with 700 homes to his credit-101 in 2003 alone-and 67 full-time employees. This year, he's branching out to upscale communities in Tampa, Bradenton and Port Charlotte. It's a far cry from 1987, when he and his wife, Phillippa, sold their first model from an office in their garage. "Phillippa used to bring the baby in a fold-up playpen to our model homes, because we didn't have anybody else to staff them," he remembers.

These days, Cannon's mother keeps his model homes supplied with new photos of Phillippa and his other two children. "People tell us, 'I come visit your homes every year just so I can see how the kids have grown,'" he says.

Despite their success, the Cannons have lived in the same old house on Siesta Key for 10 years (there's never time to remodel) and "we're using the same silverware Phillippa had when she was single." Last year, they bought a ski condo, and while their kids mastered the bunny slopes, they went to K-Mart and bought new dishes. "It felt good," he says.

Twenty-five years ago Katherine Harris would have been considered an unlikely candidate to change the course of history. True, she was serving an internship with then Sen. Lawton Chiles, but her future seemed as predictable as that as any other woman in her enviable position as the pampered daughter of an old and wealthy Florida family.

For a time, her life played itself out as one would think. She studied abroad, then worked for IBM as a marketing executive. She came to Sarasota for a job selling commercial real estate for Michael Saunders. Then she became more and more involved in community affairs, starting with the Junior League and progressing to the board of the Ringling Museum. Inspired, she says, by the example Congressman Porter Goss, she made a run for the state senate in 1994.

She won, of course, and ascended up the political ladder to become Florida's last elected Secretary of State-and we all know how important that role became in the 2000 Presidential election. Today Harris spends three days a week in Washington and on weekends comes home to her constituents. "Every Saturday morning I'm at the Farmer's Market," she says. "It used to take me 15 minutes to shop there; now it takes two hours, because that's my town meeting."

Sarasota is famous for its philanthropy, but in 1998, Virginia Toulmin got the city's attention with her first major gift to the Florida West Coast Symphony-a half-million dollars to endow the concertmaster chair.

"I never started out to be a philanthropist," says Toulmin. In fact, she was a stewardess on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad when she met her husband, Harry. Harry had agreed to help a friend whose pharmaceutical company was failing; he, and after his death, Virginia, succeeded so well that when she sold the company decades later, she says, "My ship came in." Overwhelmed, she prayed "that I would use [the money] wisely and well."

She's done that, not only in Sarasota, where since she moved here 20 years ago, she's also supported the Asolo, Van Wezel, New College, Salvation Army and United Way, but with a $60-million trust fund she established in 1997 for the Georgetown University Medical Center.

But her greatest passion is the Fund for the Children of the Americas, which runs orphanages in Santo Domingo and Thailand. "I've visited both places and hugged the children and seen with my own eyes what this love means to them," she says. "If you have been blessed with funds, it is necessary to share them with the underprivileged. But even if you can't afford to give money, you can give love."

Today Michael Saunders is one of Sarasota's best-known success stories, head of a real estate firm with offices from Bradenton to Boca Grande, 472 sales associates and $2 billion in annual sales. But the woman that Florida Trend called one of the state's leading female entrepreneurs started out as a probation officer. Actually, she says, that job was great training for real estate: "I had to be a good communicator, a good motivator, a good change agent, and to love crazy people." Plus, when she founded Michael Saunders & Co. in 1976, she was shrewd enough to see that "Sarasota was a good old boy town and a woman had a better chance of being successful if you worked for yourself."